Eight Tips for Converting Members to Donors

By Terry Axelrod

What will it take to get your members thinking about you when it comes time to make a charitable gift to your association's foundation or to your not-for-profit? How can you reposition your group to be among their top three charitable giving priorities? How can you connect your members to the longer-term impact of your work so they will consider giving to you annually, increasing their giving year after year? Consider these eight tips for converting members to donors.

1. Divide the work of your association or not-for-profit into three buckets. For example, you might choose professional development, student scholarships, and community education. For each bucket, choose a myth-buster fact, a human story, and an unmet need to showcase that aspect of your work.

    

2. Design a high-touch, succinct one-hour informational event for your members to be held in your office or theirs. Start with a talk from the organization's visionary leader (in most cases, you!); remind them of the powerful mission of your organization; and then zero in on the three buckets with stories, facts, and specific needs, without asking for money. Ideally, have at least one in-person testimonial speaker to tell their own story.

    

3. Follow up one-on-one with a personal phone call to get their feedback on the one-hour informational session. Find out what part of the presentation was most interesting to them. Offer to connect them to someone who works in that particular area. Tend those connections, one by one, to cultivate this person over time. At each point of cultivation, remind them of the inspirational stories and the needs, e.g., for students anxious to get into your field but in need of scholarship funding or the difference your profession makes every day out in the world.

    

4. Invite your members to a free one-hour fundraising ask event where you tell more inspirational stories and facts and launch a multiple-year giving society for unrestricted contributions to your organization's foundation. Be sure that at least 40% of the guests at this event have attended a prior informational event.

    

5. Have a leadership or challenge gift to announce at the ask event, contributed by a core group of members, including your board members.

    

6. Follow up after the event to thank your new donors. Be prepared to hear great things about how connected they felt to your mission and how they might like to attend again next year, perhaps serving as a table host for other members who will, by then, have attended these highly inspirational informational events.

    

7. Host special program-related free feel-good events to honor and recognize your new donors. Make sure these include a testimonial from someone who has benefited from one of the programs your foundation has funded.

    

8. Watch your giving society grow as members get reconnected to their love for the profession and over time pay off their pledges and increase their giving.

Terry Axelrod is founder and CEO of Benevon™. The author of Beyond the Ask Event, the Raising More Money Series, and The Joy of Fundraising, she can be reached at 2100 North Pacific Street ?Seattle, WA 98103; 206-709-9400; or through her website at www.benevon.com.